OK, so I have a neighbor who broke her glasses. She wanted me to make some new frames on a 3D printer.
I thought about it, and realized printing them wouldn’t be a problem. Designing them wouldn’t be a problem either, but getting them to fit her lenses, that’s the problem. So I said “I’ll have to scan your glasses”.
I do not have a 3D scanner, but I’ve probably been terribly misinformed, or duped, as it were, into believing that such a thing is possible with a smart phone, and a sequence of photos.
Many videos made it look a whole lot easier than it apparently is. In their model,
I download autodesk 123d catch, turn it on, and drag drop my images into the window.
Except, they didn’t specify which file formats it likes. I discovered it doesn’t like PNG and crashes.
It also wants me to log in with my “cloud account”. It just so happens I have Autodesk inventor, but I don’t know if that meant I had a cloud account. So I used that email, and after relooking up/changing my password, I got in…I think.
But it still didn’t do anything but crash with my PNGs.
Supposedly, after I load my non-png stack of photos, some magic cloud god voodoo happens, and then using software it neglected to mention me needing, I turn the photo stack into a 3D scan.
After that mumbo jumbo, I save the scan file as some kind of mesh I can work with in Blender, then export the STL to my repitier for cura or slic3r, and turn on my printer.
Except… it doesn’t like PNGs. It has some oddball formats called .3dp and .rzi, which I’ve never heard of. In classic “user friendly” autodesk fashion, as soon as I turned it back on just now (I’ve had the program for all of 20 minutes) it warned me in a pop up it would “soon expire!”. FFS!
Please, Please Tell me there’s some other way of doing this, preferably a method with no clouds, autodesks, or “20 minute free trials”.
My Neighbor is a nice old lady. I don’t want to muck this up.
